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Dessert

Magnum Bonum Plums

A preserved plum dish made by simmering plums in syrup, then boiling and drying them.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and plum are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,313 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Magnum Bonum Plums

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Prick the plums with a needle to prevent bursting.

  2. Simmer the plums gently in thin syrup.

  3. Place the plums in a china bowl.

  4. Let the plums cool.

Make the syrup and pot the fruit

  1. After 3 days, make a fresh syrup with 3 lbs of sugar and 5 lbs of plums, using just enough water to dissolve the sugar.

  2. Boil the plums in the fresh syrup until clear and syrup adheres to them.

  3. Transfer the plums one by one into small pots.

  4. Pour the syrup over the plums in the pots.

  5. Reserve a little syrup and boil it quickly.

Finish and serve

  1. Give the fruit a warm bath in the boiled syrup.

  2. Drain the fruit.

  3. Place the fruit on plates in a cool oven.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + plumtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Plums
The main fruit, which softens and turns clear as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out its water.

The step that matters

Boiling the plums until clear. Stop cooking once the plums look clear and the syrup clings to them. Overboiling breaks the skins and softens the flesh, while sugar concentration in the syrup determines how well the fruit keeps.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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